Chesterfield County police are investigating allegations that one of their supporters has been posted on several websites linked to such groups. Last week, the Richmond Times-Dispatch received an email from someone who identified himself as a member of the Colorado Springs branch of Antifa. The group is part of a national movement of autonomous, left-wing militant anti-fascist groups in the United States. The Colorado Springs branch alleges that a Chesterfield police officer is a member of Identity Evropa and has been a neo-Nazi since 2006, and has posted comments on Stormfront, a white nationalist and white supremacist organization websites. The Times-Dispatch sent to the Chesterfield police officers last Wednesday and asked the department about the officer. The newspaper is not the determinant of the allegations.

The attack in New Zealand was inspired in part by the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, but the real threat is lone wolves lurking in the far corners of the Internet. Over the past three decades, large-scale terrorist attacks motivated by extreme-right beliefs have almost exclusively been carried out by lone actors and small autonomous cells. The reason is simple. Maintaining an extreme-right group with terrorist ambitions is impossible in Western democracies today due to state monitoring and the lack of external support and safe havens. A recent example of extremists who tried, but failed, to prepare an attack while keeping a public profile is the British group National Action, whose leaders and activists are currently serving long prison sentences. This leaves extreme-right revolutionaries with two options: operate in the public but refrain from illegal behavior, or go underground. The key to understanding today’s terrorist threat is to be found underground—especially the online underground , which has become a breeding ground for contemporary extremists of all kinds, including the Christchurch shooter. Notably, he announced his attacks in advance on an online forum and even shared a Facebook link used to livestream the attacks. The question remains, however, whether an actual underground movement—a network of dedicated activists working together, via encrypted online applications, to prepare future terrorist attacks—exists transnationally. No one can know for sure, but by looking at previous attacks, few traces have been found suggesting that such transnational networks exist today within the extreme right.

This ugly form of racism shapes the way Muslims are perceived and treated. On Friday morning, as the news from Christchurch was still rolling across radio bulletins, Sir Mark Rowley, the former head of counter-terrorism at the Met, was commenting on the horror on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. Fifty Muslims had been brutally murdered, and 48 seriously injured. For 17 horrifying minutes, a white supremacist terrorist unloaded round after round of bullets into men, women and children. Islamophobia was undoubtedly real and on the rise and being propagated online, said Rowley. But, he went on to quibble, Islamophobia wasn’t racism. To conflate the two was, he claimed, “clumsy thinking”. The remark was treated as a random aside, made off the cuff, and left entirely unchallenged. Why? Because, it would seem, even on a morning when we’re reeling, devastated and trying to process terrorist violence in mosques, it is fair game to diminish the lived reality of Muslims. Which isn’t me being dramatic; it is simply a fact. Islamophobia is racism: it’s not a coincidence that the majority of Muslims are not white and have roots in formerly colonised countries. It’s not an exaggeration to say that racist stereotypes abound to the point where you don’t even have to be a Muslim to be attacked as one (just ask a Sikh navigating the world post-9/11). Islamophobia does not simply exist on the unpalatable mass of the internet. It’s not the preserve of rightwing extremists whom we write off as online nutters. It leaks across public life, in our institutions and our media, to form a pernicious feedback loop and almost nobody cares. If in doubt, consider the lonely figure cut by Sayeeda Warsi, whose calls for an inquiry into the documented Islamophobia within the Conservative party are blithely ignored by government.

A live-stream of Friday’s massacre was available to watch on various social media platforms hours after the incident. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has said she wants to discuss the live-streaming facility available on Facebook after the attacker broadcast the Christchurch massacre live on the platform. Ardern on Sunday said she would be looking for answers from social media firms about how the mosque attack, that killed 50 people on Friday, was livestreamed on their platforms. Using a GoPro camera, suspect Brenton Tarrant broadcast extremely graphic footage of him shooting the worshippers at Christchurch’s Al Noor Mosque via Facebook Live. The distressing 17-minute livestream was available to watch on social media for hours after the attack that also left 34 people wounded. Ardern said there were “further questions to be answered” by the social media sites. “We did as much as we could to remove, or seek to have removed, some of the footage that was being circulated in the aftermath of this terrorist attack,” said Ardern. “But ultimately it has been up to those platforms to facilitate their removal. I do think that there are further questions to be answered. New Zealand mosque attacks prompt flood of support for Muslims

Andrew Anglin found humor in the livestreamed video of a man in New Zealand storming into the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, then shooting and killing 49 people. Anglin, who runs the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, noted that a video of the shooting was being taken down almost as fast as people could put it up. “That being said, of the mass shootings I have seen this is by far the funniest one of them all,” Anglin wrote Friday morning, just hours after the mass killings. He continued: This dude is already a folk hero to so many, and we have to agree that what he did was indisputably heroic in the classical sense. It is not an uncommon thing for heroes to act foolishly. The odds are people are going to crowdfund statues and memorials in honor of this guy. This dude is funny and joking around, which makes him seem far more funny and personable than the death cult invaders that he is slaughtering. (…) His guns and equipment were marked in white with white supremacist slogans, including the “14 Words” that are a common refrain among the far right and racist communities and were first coined by American white nationalist David Lane. (…) In typical fashion, Anglin stopped just short of openly applauding the shooter in posts on the Daily Stormer. “Listen: no one gives a fuck about Moslems. These people kill us every day, they kidnap our girls, they overcome our countries and riot in the streets, and normal people are laughing their asses off that for once in history someone actually gave back what we’ve been getting,” Anglin wrote. “I don’t support this attack, obviously – I am a man of peace. But it sure as hell wasn’t bad optics.”

siehe auch: After The New Zealand Terror Attack, Here’s Why 8chan Won’t Be Wiped From The Web. On Friday, a man murdered 49 people in Christchurch, New Zealand. He targeted Muslims at two mosques in the city in what’s been deemed a terrorist attack, one of the most horrific acts of violence the country has ever seen. Shortly before the attack, in what appeared to be posts from the alleged shooter, links to a Facebook livestream of the killings were shared on 8chan. Social media channels later struggled to remove copies of that stream, while his 74-page “manifesto” also spread from 8chan across the likes of Facebook and Twitter. Long known as a haven for extremist, right-wing thought, and a wilder version of the already unruly 4Chan, the 8chan forum has courted controversy in the past. In 2015, for instance, users of the fringe site started a campaign to boycott Star Wars because it had black and female leads. In the same year, child pornography appeared on 8chan, leading Google to delist it. Channels that appear to advertise child-abuse material remain live on the site today. If the New Zealand terrorist really was radicalized on 8chan, and if there’s such a cornucopia of appalling material on the forum, what should be done to counter extremism and illegal activity on the site? Should it be taken down entirely? One company that’s helped keep the site secure and easily accessible is U.S. internet infrastructure and security provider Cloudflare. Its tech gets websites to run faster and protects them from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks where Web servers are overwhelmed with traffic. Over the years, Cloudflare has stuck by its policy of allowing anyone to enjoy its services, regardless of how extreme the website. And it has repeatedly been criticized for its “content neutral” approach. In December, it came under fire for protecting websites promoting material for groups deemed terrorist organizations, including al-Shabab and the Taliban.

Trump’s response to the horrific New Zealand terror attack, and his refusal to name white supremacist terror, is a dog-whistle directly to his far-right base. Donald Trump understands his base better than anyone. He gets what makes them cheer and what turns them off. And Trump’s response to Friday’s horrific white supremacist terrorist attack in New Zealand that saw 49 Muslims murdered was coldly calculated to play to them, especially his refusal to use the term “white supremacist terrorism.” But first there was to Trump’s reaction to the terrorist attack on Twitter where he spoke of standing, “in solidarity with New Zealand” and declaring, “We love you New Zealand!” Great sentiment but where was the mention of Muslims, as in, “I stand with the Muslim community today”?! After all, the 49 victims were all Muslims killed in their place of worship because they were Muslim. There’s no doubt Trump’s failure to say any kind words about Muslims was by design. Trump understands that would likely upset his base whom he has fed a diet of anti-Muslim hate, from declaring that “Islam hates us” to calling for a total ban on Muslims coming to this country, and his 2016 comment that takes on a different meaning after Friday’s terror attack: “We’re having problems with the Muslims coming into this country…You have to deal with the mosques, whether we like it or not.” And then, Friday afternoon, it got worse. Responding to a question by an ABC reporter about whether he believed there was a growing threat of white nationalism worldwide, Trump responded, “I don’t really,” adding, “I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems.” Our own ears and eyes (as well as statistics) tells us that’s a lie. Again, this reaction is because Trump gets his base better than anyone. Of course, this is the same Trump who hammered Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign for not saying the phrase, “radical Islamic Terrorism.” As Trump declared then, “Now, to solve a problem, you have to be able to state what the problem is or at least say the name. She won’t say the name.”

He approached the mosque on foot, his weapon visible in a country where guns are rare. “There wasn’t even time to aim, there was so many targets,” he said in the 17-minute video of the attack he posted to Facebook. Those “targets” were Muslim worshippers. A man in his late 20s has been charged with murder after at least 49 Muslims were killed in shootings at two mosques in central Christchurch, New Zealand. Two other men and a woman have also been taken into custody. Almost immediately, evidence emerged of the alleged killer’s immersion in white supremacist ideology. He engraved the “14 words” — a white supremacist slogan — on his rifle. On other weapons, he wrote the names of military leaders who led battles against nonwhite forces and men who recently carried out mass shootings of Jews and Muslims. In fact, the alleged killer praised Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik and Charleston shooter Dylann Roof in a manifesto posted to social media before the attack. And in an earlier post to the same far-right website where the video of the mosque shooting was posted, he uploaded a meme with a quote said to have been uttered by Robert Bowers, the man accused of killing 11 Jewish worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in October. The Christchurch massacre is part of a horrifying pattern of white supremacist attacks on houses of worship. Before Charleston and Pittsburgh, there was the 2012 murder of six Sikh worshippers in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. They were targeted, most likely, because the neo-Nazi shooter confused them with Muslims. But the terrorism in Christchurch is also part of a pattern of anti-Muslim sentiment fueled by white supremacist anxiety about people of color. The alleged killer’s manifesto refers to nonwhites as “invaders” who threaten to “replace” white people — the same kind of language we heard from three militia members who plotted to bomb a Kansas mosque and apartment complex housing Somali immigrants the day after the 2016 election.

siehe auch: ADL: New Zealand #Mosque #Attack Shows That White #Supremacy is an International #Terror Threat – #christchurch. The ADL (Anti-Defamation League) called the shootings at two mosques in New Zealand “the latest indication that violent white supremacists pose an international terrorist threat” and that extremists around the world “can inspire others like never before.” The shooter, identified by law enforcement authorities as Brenton Tarrant, 28, allegedly left behind a white supremacist manifesto laying out his belief that a white genocide is occurring. At least 49 people were killed at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand after the manifesto was posted online. “This attack underscores a trend that ADL has been tracking: that modern white supremacy is an international threat that knows no borders, being exported and globalized like never before,” said ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt. “The hatred that led to violence in Pittsburgh and Charlottesville is finding new adherents around the world. Indeed, it appears that this attack was not just focused on New Zealand; it was intended to have a global impact.” As has become a pattern with white supremacist violence, the shooter not only meticulously planned the attack, but also designed it for social media, even live streaming it on Facebook; The Endgame of White Supremacy Is Always Death. Police at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, the site of a mass shooting that claimed 49 lives on March 15, 2019.At least 49 people were killed on Friday in an attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, by a man whose name — by his own admission — is irrelevant. It is irrelevant, according to a 74-page manifesto he allegedly wrote, because fame and recognition did not motivate his actions. He was driven and sought to have his attack remembered by its role in advancing a larger cause. That cause is white supremacy. White supremacy comes in various forms, and few result in mass murder. Its most accepted manifestations thrive due to official legitimization, not 8chan-prowling killers. It can be observed in unexpected places. It finds subtle purchase in national magazine cover stories that argue for more restricted immigration from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, by reasoning that “too much” immigration is “destabilizing” and “politically stressful” for its host countries in Europe and North America. “Politically stressful,” in this case, means that it drives native-born white citizens to embrace demagogues and fascists. That this is as an impulse considered worth bowing to by so many suggests that immigrants are not actually the problem. White supremacy also comes shrouded in the garb of official sanction. The bodies were still warm in Christchurch on Friday when Senator Fraser Anning of Queensland, in Australia, issued a statement claiming that “the real cause of bloodshed [at the two mosques] … is the immigration program which allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand in the first place.” “[Just] because the followers of this savage belief [Islam] were not the killers in this instance does not make them blameless,” Anning said, referring to the dozens of men, women, and children who were shot dead while praying; Christchurch mosque shootings: Who were the victims? Forty-nine people are confirmed to have died in Friday’s attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Officials are now carrying out the difficult task of identifying those who have died. No victims have yet been named officially. But it’s becoming clear they came from countries around the world, and that many of them were refugees who thought they had found safety in New Zealand. Many families who have not yet made contact with their loved ones are enduring a terrible wait for news. Here are some of the people reported as dead or missing so far; Christchurch mosque shooting: The faces of the victims. New Zealand remembers the victims of the Christchurch massacre. They are fathers, mothers, grandparents, daughters and sons. They are refugees, immigrants and New-Zealand born. They are Kiwis. These are the names of those who have died or are missing after the Christchurch act of terror.